ts advantageousness, and in
consequence at this moment many Christians had availed themselves of it.
It is an English proverb that three removes are as bad as a fire; and so
great were the perils and the hardships of flight in those times, that it
was a question, in a merely earthly point of view, whether the risk of
being apprehended at home was not a far less evil than the evils which
were certain upon leaving it. There was nothing, then, ungenerous in the
ecclesiastical rule that they alone should flee, in persecution, who were
marked out for death, if they stayed. The laity, private families, and the
priests, on whose ministrations they depended, remained; bishops, deacons,
and what may be called the staff of the episcopate, notaries, messengers,
seminarists, and ascetics, would disappear from the scene of persecution.

Agellius learned from his slave that the cave had been known to him from
the time he was a boy, and that it was one of the secrets which all who
shared it religiously observed. Holy men, it seemed, had had intimations
of the present trial for several years past; and it was the full
persuasion of the heads of the Church, that, though it might blow over for
a short time, it would recur at intervals for many years, ending in a
visitation so heavy and long, that the times of Antichrist would seem to
have arrived. However, the impression upon their minds was, that then
would come a millennium, or, in some sort, a reign of the saints upon the
earth. That, however, was a date which even Agellius himself, young as he
was, would not be likely to reach; indeed, who could expect to escape, who
might not hope to gain, a Martyr's death, in the interval, in the series
of assaults, between which Christianity had to run the gauntlet? Aspar
said, moreover, that some martyrs lay in the chapels within, and that
various confessors had ended their days there. At the present time there
were representatives, there collected, of a large portion of the Churches
of the Proconsulate. A post, so to call it, went between them and Carthage
every week, and his friend and father, the bishop of that city, was
especially busy in correspondence.

Moreover, Agellius learned from him that they had many partisans,
well-wishers, and sympathizers, about the country, whom no one suspected;
the families of parents who had conformed to the established worship, nay,
sometimes the apostates themselves, and that this was the case in Sicca as
wel